The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (13 page)

‘Don’t forget, when you talk about comedy,’ said Mrs Strasberg, ‘that one has to fight as much for its truths as for any truth on earth. A hundred thousand people were placed in the Gulag for telling jokes. That’s the only point I want to make.’
‘And Khrushchev has released them, right – the comedians I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Strasberg. ‘He released them from prison the same month he sent the tanks into Hungary.’
‘It will always be a big image,’ said Ms Winters. ‘The image of those comedy writers out on strike. We campaigned a little for Wallace after the war, didn’t we, Marilyn? We were just kids. And you’d see these comedy guys huffing and puffing. These were great writers.’
‘Yeah,’ said Marilyn. ‘I dated one of them. The guy who worked at UPA.’
‘The cartoonist!’
‘Handsome guy. Too many wives.’
‘This is West Coast talk now,’ said Strasberg to the guy from McDougal Street.
‘Hold on a minute, Lee,’ said Ms Winters. ‘These guys had walked out on Disney back then. They were strikers.’
‘Socialists,’ said Marilyn.
‘It was about style,’ I said. I leapt onto my owner’s lap. ‘It was an argument about style. Your men thought Disney was promoting the idea that animation should mimic cinema reality, an imitation of real life. These guys believed that was the wrong aesthetic: they wanted to let comedy and politics have a romance, you see, on the plane of new design, new charac ter, graphic freedom. United Productions of America was a model for how art and social awareness could improve reality.’
‘Their cartoons had a message,’ said Ms Winters.
‘They certainly did,’ said Marilyn. ‘A message? They were pink all the way through.’
‘Well,’ said Winters. ‘The Committee came down on top of them like a grand piano.’
‘I can’t believe we’re talking about cartoons,’ said Lee Strasberg in his Uncle Vanya mode.
‘Oh, shush, you old goat,’ I said. ‘If it’s not bleeding from the eyes and tripping downstage carrying a giant egg-timer you think it must be frivolous.’ Marilyn placed me back on the table. Strasberg was fidgeting. He didn’t really know anything about comedy and he liked to think that art was really beyond politics. He always thought the words ‘popular culture’ had a whiff of gunpowder about them.
‘UPA lost its brightest workers in a week,’ said Ms Winters. ‘Anybody with any sort of communist affiliation. They stopped producing social conscience stuff altogether. Yet everybody now copies their style.’
‘Wow,’ said Marilyn, her thoughts drifting. ‘He was such a sweet guy.’
A waiter came with another round of drinks and I was reminded of a certain English habit that I deplored – the upper orders arguing in favour of radical politics while their servants set down their tea in front of them. Marilyn turned to Paula as the conversation turned to Clifford Odets. I snuggled into a corner of Marilyn’s coat and fell asleep. I don’t know for how long, but when I woke up I noticed many of the group had left and Marilyn was fizzy. It was the end of a conversation and Shelley Winters was looking lovingly at Marilyn as she tried to be helpful. ‘Some actors are nobody,’ said Shelley, ‘they don’t exist at all. Like Laurence Olivier. He doesn’t actually exist as a person. Even his wife says so. That’s what makes him such a good actor. And I say this as a great compliment to you, honey – the greatest compliment in the world: you are too much of a person to be a great actress. You have an existence.’
‘That’s nice, I guess.’
‘Yes, you are somebody. She’s called Norma Jeane.’ ‘Oh.’
‘She’s a beautiful thing,’ said Ms Winters. ‘But she can only be herself. That’s all I’m . . . that’s the thing I’m trying to say.’
They were both drunk I think. After a moment my fated companion said the most perplexing thing. She said: ‘The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I’m an actress.’
‘But you’re already a person, darling. Too much of a person. You will always be a star and you’ll always work. I’m your friend and what I’m saying is for your own good. What you do is not acting – it’s being. You should be proud you have too much substance to do what they do.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Those people.’ She paused. ‘Garbo. Marlon. There’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing. Zilch.’
Marilyn ate her soup and thought of Mr Strasberg, who had talked about comedy but who seldom laughed. All evening he had sat at the table like one of Colette’s ancient cats, his chin cupped in his hand, those small, cold nostrils dilated by his violent purring.
Outside it was dark. We were both huddled into Marilyn’s coat and the neon down the street was fuzzy blue. Marilyn was crying when Charlie appeared. She had seen him a few times since the night at the Copacabana, but always in passing, a wave on the way into a town car or a blown kiss from some window. But tonight he was outside the Actors Studio and he came up to ask if she was all right. ‘Hello, Charlie,’ she said. She was pleased to see him. She had a headache as she walked up the sidewalk and she felt she had lost her bearings, the tears a little unsure.
‘Let me help you, Marilyn. Can I get you a cab?’
‘Would you do that for me, Charlie?’ He skipped off and in a few minutes a yellow cab came to a stop right in front of her Ferragamos. Charlie came up behind the cab with the street light splashing on his face. ‘It was a long class today, huh? Are you sure you’re okay? Don’t need anything?’
She touched his chin. ‘You’re a sweet kid, Charlie.’
‘What about Staten Island?’ he said. ‘We talked about it the night of the premiere, remember? I said I’d show you Staten Island. We can eat hotdogs.’
‘Gee,’ she said. ‘A ferryboat.’
‘What d’ya say?’
‘I’d like that, Charlie.’
‘How about Monday?’
‘Monday?’
‘Yeah. Let’s go to Staten Island on Monday.’

* She also thought of Garbo. She imagined her playing of Anna was a footnote to Garbo and a joining of hands with the vanished actress.
* I love Stanislavsky’s dog, mainly because his behaviour opposes that horribly crude notion of my species set forth by Mr Pavlov. Whenever I think of the scientist’s salivating fools, so machine-like in their reflexes, it makes me ashamed. Russian dogs of the period, like their owners, were not so happily enslaved. And Stanislavsky’s dog had an artist’s intuition.

9

T

hey didn’t like dogs at Kenneth’s, the hairdressing salon on 54th Street. Not that it bothered me a great deal: Kenneth was one of those men with a large petted moustache and a mind like a pecan pie, sticky and dense. Kenneth always imagined he was about four minutes away from ruling the world, standing in a pair of plaid trousers, his scissors ready to dive osprey-like into the hair of some turbulent matron. Usually he stood in that very pose ready to
warple
a new piece of gossip into existence, but the day we came in he was very huffy. ‘Even for you Marilon, dahling. For you, even, my dahling Marilon, I cannot have animals in the salon. Even seeing him! Even looking at him, please!’

‘O come on, sugar. No more than five minutes. I need you to comb this out.’
‘Marilon. It breaks my heart. You call me up and I come here and we are not even open yet and already you are saying to me “dogs”.’
‘Five minutes, I promise you.’
The whole point of this was Samson, the salon’s late cairn terrier puppy. Poor Samson. He had an altercation with a laundry van and didn’t come back to life. Kenneth turned his back mumbling the kind of complaints that sound like prayers. Marilyn sat down and I stayed by the front door, Kenneth giving me hateful looks as he went to work and blinked back tears. It was a strange process in the chair over there: she was asking him to de-Marilynise her for a day of what she called ‘normality’. (This last period in New York involved many such efforts.) She could just have washed her hair in the apartment, but that wasn’t her style of de-styling: she wanted the ritual breakdown, the taking apart of last night’s heroine. On the wall there was a photograph of Samson carrying rollers in his teeth; they say he was a working animal at Kenneth’s in full-time employment. I suppose that should have made me feel more of his pain, but human sentiment takes a very heavy toll on one’s natural empathy. The whole process of de-Marilynising took much longer than she said it would – involving cold cream, lashes, the endless tying of a Bloomingdale’s scarf – so I closed my eyes and thought of other working animals. My head was full of Trompette in
Germinal
, that sad, hard-working French horse, feeling its way forward in a culture where darkness prevailed and only darkness had meaning.

From the ferryboat we watched the passing of the
Queen Elizabeth
bound for Southampton. There was something in the Cunard ship’s great majesty, in its two grey funnels gliding over the Bay, that made one imagine Europe must be a firm retort to the comedy of America. But no. The matter of the passing ship opened up a difference between Charlie and Marilyn. She held me with one hand and shielded her eyes with the other. ‘They’re going in exactly the wrong direction,’ said Charlie.

‘I wouldn’t say so,’ she said. ‘The nice people will be sitting down with silver forks in an hour. They’ll be drinking cold wine and thinking of the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square.’

‘Your ideas are very beautiful, Marilyn. But ludicrous.’

‘Well, that’s what people say. But I think those people are heading toward a little culture, no?’
‘I don’t think so. They’re leaving the culture behind. The best of Europe lives here now.’
Marilyn was thinking of Yves Montand. She was thinking of darkly clever French movies. She always thought Europeans were sniffy with her and felt compelled to give them credit for that. But Charlie was thinking of the Jews: the great escape, the miracle of survival. Charlie was an interesting new type in those days. He had the confidence, the brio, the spiritual brawn of literate young American Jews whelped on Bellow and the first book by Philip Roth. He could magic certainty out of his parents’ doubts; he could sleep with girls and drive cars and think about the condition of his people in a culture of waste. Charlie craved. Charlie yearned. He soaked up history and sensuality and spoke of the intricate dangers to world peace: Jesus Christ, Charlie was ready for anything in 1961. He was a junior editor in publishing. He made his point about the ship and Europe, but what he mostly wanted to do was kick a thousand survival myths down the field of a lighted stadium. Good old Charlie. He breezed into the elevator at the Viking Press each day with a copy of
Partisan Review
in the pocket of his windbreaker. Ruby-cheeked and ready to go, he travelled up to the eleventh floor, strode past the sexy girls with history behind him and a dick in his pants. His dark eyes were happy and naive as he made his way down the corridor, winking at himself, dwelling on the existential purity of a life of crime and the untold mysteries of the orgasm. He had read all Mailer’s essays. He cared for jazz, movies, and was moved by the psychic terrorism of the Bomb. Charlie was far into
Henderson the Rain King
and the familiar old voice within, which says ‘I want, I want, I want . . . raving and demanding, making a chaos, desiring, desiring, and disappointed continually.’ One day at a breakfast joint he tried to talk to my owner about the book’s symbols. ‘Gevalt,’ said Marilyn. ‘Don’t talk to me about symbols. Aren’t they things you clash together?’
Charlie was especially sweet on the movies. As I said, for two years he and five friends had made it their business to shadow my companion around Manhattan. Not in a creepy way: they were fans, and Marilyn felt they looked after her when she was on the East Coast. It was true she hadn’t seen so much of him recently: he was growing up. On the ferryboat to Staten Island, she felt tickled to be with him in an ordinary way, so clever and respectful, so clean and modern and alive, the Charlies of the world. The boat seemed to slow as we passed Ellis Island and I must admit I felt a stab of pain at the memory of my quarantine. It wouldn’t be long before we were California-bound again. Meanwhile, what a lovely day we had in the soft breeze with Charlie and his vast opinions about everything. Ellis Island was in a state of decay with long grass around the buildings and the windows broken. ‘So many languages were spoken there once,’ Charlie said. ‘In those halls and corridors. So many. But they were all saying the same thing, weren’t they?
Let me start again
.’
‘I guess that’s true,’ she said.
‘Like Irving Howe said, quoting one of the immigrants: “America was in everybody’s mouth”.’
Marilyn put her arms behind her on the railing and the wind blew the tails of her headscarf as she smiled. She was looking back at Manhattan. ‘It’s a place to get lost in. It’s a place where you can disappear,’ she said. ‘And doesn’t everybody want that eventually?’ The boat moved on and the wastes of Ellis Island were quickly supplanted by the stone cartoon of Liberty, thousands of starlings wheeling over the statue, forming a grey elastic cloud around her head. From the deck of the ferryboat, I could hear the birds: they weren’t murmuring at all, they were joshing as a single choir, poking fun at the human notion of liberty. ‘They call that freedom?’ The starlings made the observation into an occasion for selfcelebration. Birds are always talking out of charity to themselves, snapping, preening, touting the superiority of their own experience. They pitied people to ennoble themselves. That was my thought as the boat rode into the foam.
‘Arthur’s brother Kermit always said their family left Poland clutching sewing machines,’ Marilyn said. ‘That’s a fact. Their father Isidore is a dream of a man. When he was a kid he turned up on Ellis Island with a scab on his head the size of a silver dollar.’
‘My people were the same,’ said Charlie. ‘Garments. They made coats. They lost it all in the Depression. How does that sound? If immigration taught my people how to be capitalists, the Depression taught us how to be leftists.’
Marilyn put me on a leash and I walked around the deck quoits.
‘To understand the pure good of America you have to have been a communist in your youth,’ said Charlie. ‘You have to have felt, at least once, that after a certain point money-making is aggression. It murders people.’
‘That’s the way Arthur talks in his plays. But I don’t know about real life. He always seemed pretty interested in money to me.’
‘That’s the way it is. You hate it and you love it. You hate loving it. You love hating it.’
‘Hey, buster,’ I said, licking his trouser leg. ‘Stick to being a fan of the movies. You don’t know the half of what people want. You young guys wouldn’t know a cause if it slapped you in the face!’
‘Okay, wise guy,’ she said. ‘What else is true?’
‘Garments,’ he said. ‘You throw a little survivors’ guilt in among all those American rags and you’ve got yourself a national literature.’
‘Ha! The cheek,’ I said.
‘Arthur used to read Bashevis Singer to me,’ said Marilyn. ‘I converted, you know?’
‘To Singer?’
‘To the whole cannoli.’
‘Good for you,’ Charlie said. ‘Now we’re equal.’ She laughed and then hid her laughter, afraid she might be recognised. ‘Those dockyards over there have stories to tell,’ he continued. ‘We all have stories to tell and they’re never the ones your family wanted.’
‘That’s for sure.’
They looked over at the chemical plants of New Jersey. The photographer Sam Shaw once told her they only produced chlorine and cyanide. My memory gave me a little gust of almonds and evil, a memory of something I’d absorbed about Hitler feeding poison to his dog Blondi. I suddenly felt grateful for Charlie and his generation, the things they might do to take the world forward. The pair talked about California and Marilyn’s forthcoming trip to Mexico for her divorce. It seemed to her that Charlie was always sizing her up for an education, but she found that cute in someone so fundamentally green. ‘None of us has our own names,’ he said. ‘You’re not you. I’m not me. Nobody in America is who they are.’
‘What do your parents call you?
‘Gedaliah. The Jews are my unconscious,’ he said. ‘My parents were wage slaves. They scrubbed and cleaned and now they are proud to say they know nothing of the working class.’
‘Gee,’ she said.
‘They deny the workers. They say they don’t know anything of such people.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess we all grow.’
‘That’s right. We all grow. I saw some pages of Bellow’s new work-in-progress. Do you know what one of the characters says? He says, “He sometimes imagined he was an industry that manufactured personal history.” That’s what it says in his next book, Marilyn. I’m not kidding – it’s me. That’s me talking. It’s the story of my entire life.’
‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said. ‘That’s cute. You’re twenty-three years old. You don’t know what the story of your life is.’ She reflected for a moment and showed me thoughts are stories. She always did that. She showed me encounters are stories and moments sagas. The ferry made its way up the Bay and nature suddenly seemed awake to us, to them, to Charlie and Marilyn and their laughter and their passing camaraderie, the little flag at the end of the boat snapping in pointless allegiance.
‘Do you really think Kennedy will make all the difference?’ Charlie said.
‘I hope so. It would be swell, wouldn’t it, just to have a guy who’s on your side?’
‘Yup.’
‘It feels like a natural change.’
‘Nature might be a mentality,’ he said. ‘Everything changes. Change is ordained. If Kennedy hadn’t come along we might have invented him. No question.’
‘That’s tough,’ she said. ‘It can’t be easy living up to people’s hopes, like that, don’t you think? So many hopes?’ She looked out and remembered Anna Christie.
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘We manufacture hope. That’s just the way it is over there.’
He gestured towards New Jersey.
‘What a game,’ she said.
‘People love it,’ Charlie said, smiling again. ‘Hoping and believing. That’s just what people love in Linoleumville.’ Charlie took out a pack of Twinkies. Good man. He gave me two in a row. Good man. Underneath all his thinking and quoting, Charlie just wished more girls would kiss him. He stroked me for a moment with displaced affection. ‘In
Henderson
,’ he said, almost wistfully, ‘the character says a person might reason with an English dog.’
‘I’m not English,’ I said. ‘I’m Scottish. An ancestor of mine is known to have licked the face of his dead owner at Culloden.’
Nationalities. Don’t get me started. I had to explain to a squirrel in Battery Park that dogs need no translation from one language to another – that is simply another human problem, and a problem for Manhattan squirrels apparently. We hear expression very clearly, as if it was being played on a series of wonderful drums. I didn’t have much luck explaining to the squirrel that drumming was a native American tradition.